Browsing by Subject "decision making"

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Open Access
Behavioural analyses of quinine processing in choice, feeding and learning of larval drosophila
(2012) El-Keredy, A.; Schleyer, M.; König, C.; Ekim, A.; Gerber, B.
Gustatory stimuli can support both immediate reflexive behaviour, such as choice and feeding, and can drive internal reinforcement in associative learning. For larval Drosophila, we here provide a first systematic behavioural analysis of these functions with respect to quinine as a study case of a substance which humans report as "tasting bitter". We describe the dose-effect functions for these different kinds of behaviour and find that a half-maximal effect of quinine to suppress feeding needs substantially higher quinine concentrations (2.0 mM) than is the case for internal reinforcement (0.6 mM). Interestingly, in previous studies (Niewalda et al. 2008, Schipanski et al 2008) we had found the reverse for sodium chloride and fructose/sucrose, such that dose-effect functions for those tastants were shifted towards lower concentrations for feeding as compared to reinforcement, arguing that the differences in dose-effect function between these behaviours do not reflect artefacts of the types of assay used. The current results regarding quinine thus provide a starting point to investigate how the gustatory system is organized on the cellular and/or molecular level to result in different behavioural tuning curves towards a bitter tastant. © 2012 El-Keredy et al.
Open Access
Designing a decision support system for debt payment planning under inflation
(1994) Özkan, Mehmet
Computer technology has been developed very rapidly in recent years and now computers are even replacing human in some areas. Use of judgment, however, is still very important in many other fields. Financial management is one of the areas that need managerial judgment and intuition while making decisions. In this study, we propose a methodology for designing a system to assist the decision maker (DM) in using his judgment to make effective decisions. The system also has to facilitate and enhance learning since judgment is excelled by experience. We specificly analyze decisions regarding the Debt Payment Planning (DPP) problem. This problem, which may be briefly stated as ‘development of an operational plan for the liquidation of debts’, is a new problem and does not exist in the literature. The analyses are conducted keeping in mind that the uncertainty of the financial environment and burden of inflation increase the complexity of the decisions. A model which we call, ‘Growth Model of Debt’ will be used in the analyses and a sample session will be shown to provide a clear understanding of the system operation.